Man in the Movies
Agee on Film. Criticism and Comment on the Movies.
by James Agee.
McDowell, Obolensky. 432 pp. $6.00.
Despite the ease with which legends are manufactured, there is one respect in which the Agee legend seems to me justified: namely, in the scope of his endeavors, the sheer variety of his efforts, and his endurance of involvements so multifarious as to create a kind of personal isolation. Lyric poet, annalist of the sharecropper, white-haired boy of the Luce hierarchy, actor, television personality, peer of the avant-garde, Hollywood script-writer, his was a truly fabulous career, a safari which gave him a shot at all the American big game.
The work collected in Agee on Film offers a veritable jungle, a cross-hatched reticulation of values for those capable of disentangling them. Here is a highly endowed individual busy evaluating American life as it came at him through a medium and had to be refracted through an institution. The very style of his writing and the nature of his perspective changed radically under every institution for which he wrote—thereby supplying us with a critique of those institutions more directly relevant than can be supplied in any other way. Agee was engaged in exploring the new planet of American consciousness.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men gives us, in a way, the platform from which all the subsequent operations of his life were launched. A man of unusual ability is sent by a wealthy Northern magazine to investigate the conditions of the sharecroppers, people who were the neighbors of his childhood, and tries desperately, inchoately, to do what? Certainly not merely to report them, to “see them,” but—as C. Wright Mills wrote in a brilliant review in the now-defunct Politics—to make contact with them, to satisfy some elementary need for human solidarity. As Mills pointed out, Agee fails to break through all the differences to achieve this contact. This failure goads him to a frenzy of verbalization, an unprecedented expansion and condensation of language, furiously self-involved attacks on avant-garde and slick magazines, dithyrambs to Beethoven and other artists, tortured attempts to describe people, houses, chairs, oil lamps in such a way that the words themselves will take on material reality, afford him a satisfaction of contact which will substitute for the real one. He is, as it were, at the focus of all the basic oppositions of American life, city against country, North against South, intellectual against mass, big-money magazines against highbrow quarterlies. The inability of the author to come to any satisfactory terms with them is the real story of the book, a modem variant of the traditional American saga of artists who, beginning with Whitman, have refused to give up any possibility of appealing experience.
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Having failed in a quest for direct universal experience which could be rendered in art, Agee apparently chose the cinema as the most satisfactory substitute for such experience. There it was brought to him prearranged by people more assuredly and crudely in contact with its varieties than he was himself; stars, directors, producers were themselves powerful factors in American life as well as its receiving and transmitting agents. He actually began reviewing movies for Time in 1941 and started his film column in the Nation in 1942, both of which ceased in 1948 after providing a spectacle of schizophrenic virtuosity, in seeing the same event through two personalities, unique in the history of journalism. Selections from Time and Nation reviews, two essays from Life, a short article on popular culture from Partisan Review and a lengthy review of Sunset Boulevard (from the British Sight and Sound) comprise a volume which has a certain historic dimension all its own, a warmth and largesse of spirit characteristic of the era.
The basic incoherences of Agee’s mind are least apparent in the Time pieces; the Luce perspective, except for a few remarkable personal outbursts, forced them into an artificial unity, and the harsh demands of money-making journalism precluded the lavish subjectivity that disfigures so many of the Nation reviews. (The latter frequently have the tone of a man with a captive audience that not only does not object to the intrusion of inapposite personal detail, but actually requires it for sustenance.) Because of their order, clarity, and lack of affectation, the Time reviews afford one a certain relief by contrast, a relief which quickly gives way to irritation at the palpable suppression of the author’s sensibility. The Life essays on John Huston and silent-film comedians have the conceptual structure that characterizes most of the large-scale articles on the arts that appear in that magazine: a portentously serious idea, of such academic solidity as to be unassailable, serves, with almost magical dexterity, as the lead-in and connecting thread to a superabundant wealth of entertaining reminiscences, gossipy anecdotes, and moderately interesting information. The Partisan Review article is a fragmentary series of aperçus without much linkage or evidence of over-all thought.
Agee’s esential cinematic experience is distilled in the Nation series and one can approach it from several points of view, depending on one’s bias, among them Agee’s own announced standpoint as an “amateur critic among amateur critics,” simply talking in print about common experiences. For a variety of reasons, some of which I hope are obvious, I find this statement unacceptable. Those who believe that cinema is an art (which still seems to me a matter for debate) and have some notion of what constitutes good cinema and hence good cinema criticism, can apply it to these columns, in which case, I believe, they will find them, on the whole, a failure.
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There are actually only two important ways of using a movie camera, by way of its possibilities and by way of its nature. The first is the dominant approach of European cinema, the latter of the American. The American use of the camera is naturalistic in more senses than one; the camera as a recording and transmitting agent is what counts for the American film-makers, which precludes the maximum use of all its possibilities, particularly of “montage,” according to Eisenstein the quintessence of high cinematic art. The American directors and producers simply bring us what we cannot go out and look at ourselves, spectacular people, actions and scenes that we must see in order to complement our own narrow range of experience. The natural center of the film is the star rather than, as in the European film, the writer-director to whom the images, actors, nature itself, are mere integers in the sum of his own dominating conception. The American audience mostly goes to see Cary Grant, James Cagney, Bing Crosby. The story unfolds their reality interlocked with the reality of the characters they represent (gangster, sophisticate, athlete) in environments which, by repetition, take on some of the characteristics of stars themselves, glamorous entities in the world of nature like the fissured reaches of the painted desert, the tumbleweed-strewn road to the petrified forest, or the more human neonscape of Broadway.
The Hollywood-style movie is essentially presentative, giving us as many aspects as possible of the things and people we want to see within the dynamic continuum of a story and organizing them formally. As in any art primarily concerned with sensory experience, ideas, story, overt social and political bias, though important, are inherently secondary. Indeed, the superficial content of a film may be in sharp contrast to the underlying and more powerful pull of the artistic urge behind it. For example, the law-and-order messages of most gangster films are in opposition to a basic pull toward rebellion and anarchy; pictures which come out against anti-Semitism or segregation often create character images at odds with their own content.
Agee’s criticism of American movies seems to me inadequate partly because of the lack of an aesthetic scheme, partly because of his inability to perceive the full truth about some of the performers and the life out of which they emerge. Thus, to begin with a distinctly minor example, a picture like Killer McCoy is slighted by Agee; to be sure, its story and intellectual content are cheap and impoverished, but it is actually a first-rate film due to the superb projection by Mickey Rooney and Jimmy Dunn of images of certain classes of people in action, of what in them can be most readily transmuted into artistic terms. A director like John Huston is praised in irrelevant terms for his personality, which, however, often gets between the actors and the audience. Huston’s ability to translate works of literature to the screen is of little intrinsic value; his most noteworthy films, The Treasure of Sierra Madre or The Maltese Falcon, add little to what can be obtained from a reading of Traven’s powerful novel or Hammett’s tour de force. Though Agee frequently singles out the right actors for praise or blame, the characterizations are often inapposite and academic—as in the Life essay on silent comedians which holds them to be immensely superior, in sheer capacity to produce unforced laughter, to the clowns of the sound era. This appraisal scarcely corresponds to the facts, for the entire world of the silent film, despite its other virtues, is too freakish, Gothic, and often unintentionally somber, for natural, spontaneous laughter.
There is, however, a less specialized approach to movies and its criticism which is perhaps closest to the way movies actually function in the life of the nation as a whole: that is, as a medium with no autonomous qualities whatever, a gigantic grab-bag of all the arts and intellectual pursuits where the finest museum gems jostle the baubles of uninspired hacks, mingling political, social, and religious concepts borrowed from the classics with ad hoc nostrums, offering something for every level of intellect and sensibility. Agee can be most sympathetically seen as a man wading into this stupefying cultural bog armed with everything from a Burroughs adding-machine to a pitchfork, not to mention a machine gun, deodorizer, and Geiger-counter. He deals with all aspects of the phenomenon and becomes, as a result, perhaps the only gifted writer of the period to get into print with animadversions on every aspect of the American scene, carrying high-level analysis sufficiently far into the world of social consequence so that the ideals of the imagination and intellect get at least within hailing distance of the muddy visage of daily life.
The animadversions vary in quality, as does the style. But, taken altogether, Agee on Film is undoubtedly one of the most impressive volumes of recent years. How much the weaknesses of its subject matter will ultimately lessen its force is difficult to predict. At present, it offers fascinating reading, stirring one’s own critical faculties to appreciative or irritated life at every sentence.
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